Papi. 🇩🇴 New Yorker. Assistant Prof of Public Affairs, University of Utah. PhD @UMassEcon @Center4EconDem. He/him. Just assume the University disagrees.
Salt Lake City, UT
Joined August 2014
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"Since launching, @econ4freedom's website has already attracted over 11,000 people—this tells us there is indeed a hunger for liberatory economics education."
Sarah Wang from @Center4EconDem and I in @npquarterly urging movements to prioritize pop ed 💭
nonprofitquarterly.org/educa…
Francisco Pérez retweeted
@florianederer asks a fair question, but the counterfactual is unobservable, b/c nobody publishes rejection letters (unless Florian is asking authors to share those).
What we can observe is impact. So here’s a different test. 🧵 1/
Heterodox economists claim that they're systematically shut out of top econ journals.
So I have a genuine question:
What are the best recent heterodox papers that deserved publication in a top journal but were rejected?
@IsabellaMWeber @devikadutt @DanielaGabor
Francisco Pérez retweeted
I think there is much to Francisco’s observation about normies vs. economists here. But it highlights another interesting development. On the one hand, economists (as individuals) probably come from much father left of the political spectrum than a few decades ago (although still less so than the other social sciences/humanities). On the other hand, there has been an interesting – and perhaps unexpected --flip between micro and macro.
I think the issue here is that most normies think of economics as macro (unemployment, inflation, growth, etc.) when the large majority of economists are applied microeconomists. While micro is ideological too (the questions asked and not asked, the interventions tested, etc.)
Can you tell me where in my reseach or anywhere else in my work I have used a DGSE model?
More generally, what motivates you to make such a broad statement about our entire discipline?
For some reason, I quite often see similar statements by persons who call themselves "heterodox". Strong assertions about what we mainstream economists supposedly do that are completely at odds with the reality of mainstream econ research I see every day.
This leads me to lose confidence in other statements by that person. It raises doubts about whether the person cares about getting the facts right when making any assertion.
This is like when people claim to speak without an accent. All social science researchers have bias like all speakers have accents. We can discuss the best way to address these biases but it's childish or disingenous to pretend that any human studying other humans is objective.
The fatal challenge to heterodox economics is that there isn't actually orthodox economics.
Just take a few recent Nobels: behavioral, information failure, institutions, bubbles, financial fragility, labor monopsony (sort of), Schumpeterian creative destruction, etc.
Not to mention RCTs which are emblematic of how much economic research is empirical and only lightly if at all structural.
The real difference is methods. Heterodox economics is an avowedly political project not a social scientific effort to better understand the world. And I have nothing against political projects just shouldn't confuse the two.
Francisco Pérez retweeted
when my students resort to such 'actually, economics is depoliticized science' arguments, I ask them to read a mainstream economist's view of his tribe.
The fatal challenge to heterodox economics is that there isn't actually orthodox economics.
Just take a few recent Nobels: behavioral, information failure, institutions, bubbles, financial fragility, labor monopsony (sort of), Schumpeterian creative destruction, etc.
Not to mention RCTs which are emblematic of how much economic research is empirical and only lightly if at all structural.
The real difference is methods. Heterodox economics is an avowedly political project not a social scientific effort to better understand the world. And I have nothing against political projects just shouldn't confuse the two.
Francisco Pérez retweeted
Still, I’d like to see more people of African descent tackle economics and economic development topics. There are so few of us writing, publishing, analyzing, etc.
and it’s not easy
Some spaces are shrinking and new ones are opening
The glass is at once half full and empty
I used to live in Sierra Leone. This was a heartbreaking read. Already by early 2010s Guinea Bissau was a narco-state so I'm not surprised. SL's GDP is less than US$8 billion. Sadly, a few million to the right people buys you a whole government.
This is quite the exposé on the astonishing capture of the Sierra Leonean state (which is still heavily subsidized by the EU) by Dutch cocaine kingpin Jos Leijdekkers
Insanely brazen killings and galling coverups described in here
theguardian.com/global-devel…
Francisco Pérez retweeted
This is an ENORMOUS loss for economics. Perry Mehrling was one of the best monetary thinkers of our times. He left us an inmense oeuvre, with huge influence on monetary theory and on many economists (including myself). And a great guy. Really sad sad news.
Francisco Pérez retweeted
Sad news.
Today, we lost one of the greatest thinkers of political economy. Rest in peace Anwar Shaikh.
Francisco Pérez retweeted
Disappointing to see @UUtah continue to slide as well as the legislature thinks they know how to better manage a university than people who actually spend time on campus.
Francisco Pérez retweeted
We are back at rate hikes to fight a supply shock. Will this stop the war against Iran? Will it reopen the Strait of Hormuz? Will higher financing costs help build out renewables?
No.
But it risks pushing livelihoods & democracies over the edge.
Francisco Pérez retweeted
The largest debtors to the IMF. Tell me Argentina is technically justified...
It has a larger portion than the entire continent of Africa. 😱
Francisco Pérez retweeted
This shit is so wild. They generated 51 robot economists and they concluded "Free health care, housing, and transportation don't provide the same kind of meaning and human value as an Earned Income Tax Credit" great work guys institute.deepmind.com/essay…
Francisco Pérez retweeted
we knew Iran got hands but we didn’t know it could do exceptional shittalking about monetary policy too
